It's telling that what is perhaps the NCAA's most forceful intervention in collegiate athletics and athletics-related institutional misconduct (at Penn State) is also such an utterly colossal fuck-up.
The NCAA's punishment for Penn State consists primarily of a $60,000,000 fine, a ban on post-season football for Penn State for four years, and the loss of 20 scholarships per year over a four-year period.
I'm happy to translate this punishment for you. There will be:
1) a $60,000,000 fine to be born by the University, which, however foolishly, has too much of its finances tied up in its disgrace of a football team. This means that those who suffer most from this fine will be the real student-athletes at the university: people who play softball, track & field, volleyball, soccer, and so on, not as slave labor in a fake-amateur, exploitative professional sporting atmosphere, but as true extracurricular athletes. How or whether this fine will affect the primary mission of the University (purportedly)--to educate students--is something I'm not sure about.
2) a guarantee that instead of not spending time preparing for classes and learning stuff and instead rooting for Penn State in the Bowl Season, the rabid PSU football fans for the next four years will spend time not preparing for classes and learning stuff and instead rooting against Michigan and Ohio State in the Bowl Season.
3) a guarantee that with the loss of scholarships current student football players will have to seriously consider uprooting their lives to transfer to a new institution to play football, along with a guarantee that young people will lose scholarship opportunities, perhaps the one partially redeemable aspect of big-time NCAA football.
As you can see, the NCAA has imposed a penalty designed to make the NCAA look tough on sports and sports-program related misconduct, as though the NCAA, the lousiest rent-seeking fake agency there ever was, would ever truly consider what happened at Penn State as a fine occasion to dismantle itself, pack up, and fade the fuck away into the darkest recesses of the annals of the history of unrepentant shame. But no, the NCAA has found a way to make a terrible situation at Penn State even worse by posturing and penalizing more or less any innocent student and potentially reasonable side effect of the institutional dominance of that bloated beast of a distraction, the Penn State football team.
Not that the NCAA actually has any legitimate power that a university president and board of trustees couldn't swat away with full institutional authority (were any of these people serious about the fundamental mission of higher education, which is to say, higher education); but if it were up to me and I had the power to impose sanctions on Penn State, I'd order the football team to pay that fine to the University itself for education, and for merit and financial need scholarships, never to be spent on football again. I'd demand that the football team operate as a nonprofit entity in relation to the University, such that any and all profits at the end of the season go directly into the general fund, under the discretion of the trustees, administration, and faculty of the university, never to be spent on football again. Instead of taking away scholarships, I'd demand that Penn State honor all of its football scholarships, even if the players decide to quit playing football or transfer to another university (PSU would have to pay for these students to attend another institution up to the cost of PSU tuition). For starters.
Admittedly, however, it's awfully difficult to separate out the football program for punishment when the football program was able to gain such influence over the institution as a whole. I'm sure we'll continue to have a national conversation about what all this means for Penn State football, forgetting entirely that the fundamental issue of a child abuse cover-up was the direct result of an institutional power imbalance that is not unique to Penn State, and whose evils are not confined to sexual abuse scandals.
